Iurie Roșca: ”Happy to be part of the anti-system dissident wave for the
second time!”
Interview by Alberto Cossu and Filippo Romeo for www.vita.it
«I sincerely hope that the European Union in the current formula is
ready to die. I am expecting the repetition of the Soviet story, the
total collapse and the reorganization of the political landscape at
the...Cette note a été publiée le samedi, 04 août 2018Pour lire la note entièrement, veuillez cliquer iciSénèque et notre temps

Pagan Pound
By Stead Steadman Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com
The following is the text of a talk given in London on May 27, 2018 at
The Poet at War , an event convened by Vortex Londinium.
“We want an European religion. Christianity is verminous with semitic
infections. What we really believe is the pre-Christian element which...Cette note a été publiée le vendredi, 03 août 2018Pour lire la note entièrement, veuillez cliquer iciRuimterevolutie: Hoe de walvisjacht ons wereldbeeld veranderde

Between the Heroic & the Immeasurable: The Historical
Background of Oswald Spengler’s Philosophy of Science
By A. E. Stern Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com
Oswald Spengler’s writings on the subject of the philosophy of science
are very controversial, not only among his detractors but even for his
admirers. What is little understood is...Cette note a été publiée le mercredi, 01 août 2018Pour lire la note entièrement, veuillez cliquer iciUne “OTAN arabe” - L’instrument de Trump contre l’Iran

The Movement – the gravedigger of globalism or The mission of American
Steve Bannon in Europe
Iurie Roșca
Ex: http://flux.md
Paraphrasing the famous quote of Marx, we can state without any
exaggeration: ”A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of populism”.
After a series of promising signs for the European populists or...Cette note a été publiée le mardi, 24 juillet 2018Pour lire la note entièrement, veuillez cliquer ici

mercredi 15 août 2018

Monika Berchvok Speaks With Robert Steuckers

Following the publication of Pages celtiques by éditions du Lore and the trilogy Europa
by éditions Bios of Lille, Monika Berchvok subjected the author of
these works, Robert Steuckers, to a rapid fire volley of questions,
showing that even the rebels of the young generation of the 2010s want
to know the oldest roots of this silent revolt which is growing across
all of Europe. Monika Berchvok previously interviewed Robert Steuckers
during the publication of La Révolution conservatrice allemande by éditions du Lore in 2014.

Your career is extremely intellectually wealthy. What is the origin of your engagement?

To speak of intellectual wealth is certainly exaggerated: I am above
all a man of my generation, to whom they still taught the “basics”,
which today, alas, have disappeared from academic curricula. I
experienced my childhood and adolescence in a world that was still
marked by quiet tradition, the mores and manners were not those of the
industrial world or the service sector, where we increasingly separate
from concrete and tangible reality, increasingly acquiring an unbounded
pretension and arrogance against “provincials,” like me, who remain
anchored in the muck of reality with their heavy boots (yes, yes, that’s
from Heidegger…). My father, who really hadn’t been to school, except
to the primary school in his Limburg village, wanted nothing to do with
the fashions and crazes that agitated our contemporaries in the 1960s
and 70s; “all fafouls,” he claimed, “fafoul” being a Brussels dialect
term used to designate idiots and cranks. I lived in a home without
television, far from and hostile to the mediocre little universe of the
pop tune, variety show, and hippy or yéyé subculture. I still thank my
progenitor, 25 years after his death, for having been able to totally
resist the miserable abjection of all those years where decline advanced
in giant steps. Without television, it goes without saying, I had a lot
of time to read. Thanks Papa.

Next, I was a gifted student in primary school but fundamentally lazy
and desperately curious, the only life saver, to avoid ending up a
tramp or a prole, was learning languages to a competent level because,
in Brussels, I lived on a street where they spoke the three national
languages (and the dialectical variants), with the Russian of a few
former White officers and their children who wound up in our fair city
in addition. With this linguistic plurality, the task was already half
done. Clément Gstadler, a neighbor, an old Alsatian teacher who had
ended up in Belgium, told me, donning his ever present traditional hat
of the Thann countryside and with a razor sharp Teutonic accent: “My
boy, we are as many times men as languages we know.” Strengthened by
this tirade hammered into me by Gstadler, I thus enrolled, at the age of
eighteen, in Germanic philology and then in the school of translators –
interpreters.

The origin of my engagement is the will to remain faithful to all
these brave men that we consider anachronistic today. On their
certitudes, under siege, we must erect a defensive structure, which we
hope will become offensive one day, resting on principles diametrically
opposed to the hysterics of the trendy people, to construct in our
hearts an alternative, impregnable fortress, that we are determined
never to give up.

How do you define your metapolitical combat?

Dilthey, with whom the alternative minded of our type unfortunately
aren’t familiar enough, partially constructed his philosophical system
around one strong simple idea: “We only define what is dead, the things
and facts whose time has definitively ended.” This fight is not over
because I haven’t yet passed from life to death, doubtlessly in order to
thwart those who my stubbornness displeases. It is evident, as a child
of the 1950s and 60s, that my first years of life unfolded in an era
where we wanted to throw everything away. It’s of course a gesture that I
found stupid and unacceptable.

Retrospectively, I can say that I felt, in my young mind, that
religion left the scene as soon as it renounced Latin and the spirit of
the crusader, very present in Belgium, even among peaceful, calm,
authors, like a certain Marcel Lobet, totally forgotten today,
doubtlessly because of the excessive moderation of his words,
nevertheless ultimately invigorating for those who knew how to capture
their deep meaning. The philosopher Marcel Decorte, in his time, noted
that society was disintegrating and that it was collapsing into
“dissociety,” a term that we find again today, even in certain left wing
circles, to designate the present state of our countries, weakened by
successive waves of “civilizational negationism,” such as the ideology
of Mai 68, New Philosophy, neo-liberal pandemonium, or gender ideology,
all “dissociative” phenomena, or vectors of “dissociation,” which today
converge in the Macronist imposture, mixing together all these baneful
delusions, seven decades after opening Pandora’s Box. Thus the
metapolitical combat must be a combat that unceasingly exposes the
perverse nature of these civilizational negationisms, continuously
denouncing above all the outfits, generally based beyond the Atlantic,
that fabricate them in order to weaken European societies to create a
new humanity, totally formatted according to “dissociative” criteria,
negators of reality as it is (and cannot be otherwise, as the relevant
philosopher Clément Rosset remarked, who unfortunately passed away in
recent weeks). To make a metaphor with the ancient world, I would say
that a metapolitical combat, in our sense, consists of, as the European
history expert of Radio Courtoisie Thomas Ferrier said, putting all
these negationisms in Pandora’s Box, from which they sprang, then
closing it.

You mention “bio-conservatism” in your recent works? What does this term cover?

I didn’t mention “bio-conservatism.” My editor, Laurent Hocq of
Editions Bios, believes that it’s a path we will need to explore,
precisely in order to fight “civilizational negationisms,” notably all
the elements that deny the corporeality of man, his innate
phylogenetics, and his ontology. For me a well conceived
bio-conservatism must go back to the implicit sociology that Louis de
Bonald sketched in the 19th century, critiquing the
individualist drift of the Enlightenment philosophers and the French
Revolution. Romanticism, in its non-ethereal or tearful aspects, insists
on the organicity, vitalist and biological, of human and social
phenomena. We must couple these two philosophical veins – traditional
conservative realism and organic Romanticism – and then connect them to
the more recent and more scientifically established achievements of
biocybernetics and systems theory, while avoiding falling into perverse
social engineering as desired by the Tavistock Institute, whose cardinal
role in the elaboration of all forms of brain washing that we’ve
endured for more than sixty years was investigated by the “conspiracy
theorist” Daniel Estulin, now living in Spain. The “Tavistockians” used
biocybernetics and systems theory to impose a “depoliticized” culture
across the Western world. Today these disciplines can be perfectly
mobilized to “re-politicize” culture. Laurent Hocq wants to initiate
this work of metapolitical mobilization with me. We will have to
mobilize people competent in these domains to complete the task.

At the end of the road, rethinking “bio-conservatism” is nothing more
or less than the will to restore a “holistic” society in the best sense
of the term as quickly as possible, that is to say a society that
defends itself and immunizes itself against the fatal hypertrophies
leading us to ruin, to degradation: economic hypertrophy, juridical
hypertrophy (the power of manipulative and sophist jurists), the
hypertrophy of the services sector, hypertrophy of petty moralism
detached from reality, etc.

Localism is also a theme that often reoccurs in your recent books.
For you the return to the local has an identitarian dimension, as well
as a social and ecological one?

Localism or the “vernacular” dimensions of human societies that
function harmoniously, according to timeless rhythms, are more necessary
than ever at a time where a sagacious geographer such as Christophe
Guilluy notes the decline of “France from below”, the marvelous little
provincial towns that are dying before our eyes because they no longer
offer a sufficient number of local jobs and because their light industry
has been relocated and dispersed to the four corners of the planet.Attention to localism is an urgent necessity in our time, in order to
respond to a terrifying evil of neo-liberalism that has expanded since
Thatcher’s accession to power in Great Britain and all the fatal
policies that the imitators of this “Iron Lady” have seen fit to import
into Europe and elsewhere in the world.

The refusal of the migratory “great replacement” happens through
an understanding of immigration movements in the era of total
globalization. How can the tendency of migratory flows be reversed?

By not accepting them, quite simply. We are a stubborn phalanx and it
is imperative that our stubbornness become contagious, taking on the
appearance of a global pandemic.

Nevertheless, when you mention the fact that there must be an
“understanding of migratory movements,” you indirectly underline the
necessity of deeply understanding the contexts from which these migrants
come. For half a century, and even longer since Mai 68 had antecedents
in the two decades that preceded it, we have been fattened on junk
culture, of inane varieties, which occupies our minds with time
consuming spectacles and prevents them from concentrating on things as
real as they are essential. A good state is a state that inquires about
the forces at work in the world. Whether migratory flows are accepted or
not, every host state, guided by a healthy vision of things, should
draw up an economic, ethnic, and social cartography of the populations
coming from the emigrants’ countries.

For Africa, that means understanding the economic state of each
migrant exporting country, the possible system of kleptocracy that
reigns there, the ethnic components (and the conflicts and alliances
that result from them), the history of each of these political or
anthropological phenomena, etc. This knowledge must then be delivered by
an honest press to the citizens of our countries, so that they can make
judgments about credible pieces and not be forced to vote according to
unremitting propaganda based on inconsistent slogans.

For Syria we should have known, before the waves of refugees spilled
into Europe, the religious and tribal structures of the country in a
very precise manner: actually, the media, generally uncultivated and
dependent on the “junk culture” imposed on us for decades, discovered
the Syrian divisions that had been ignored until now. Only a handful
among us has a clear notion of who the Alawites or Yezidis are, knows
that the Syrian Christian communities have complicated divisions,
understands the tacit alliance that unites Alawites with Twelver
Shiites, understands that the principal enemy of the Ba’athist political
system is the Muslim Brotherhood, which fomented the terrible disorders
of 1981-1982 that ravaged Syria in the time of Hafez al-Assad, father
of the current president. In short, the general public knows nothing
about the complexity of Syria. The only bone it has to gnaw is the
slogan that decrees Assad is a horrible monster, fit to be eliminated by
fundamentalist assassins or American bombs.

For Africa, the only means of reducing
the waves of refugees, real or solely economic, would be to put an end
to evidently very kleptocratic regimes, in order to fix the populations
on their native soil by redirecting sums of money toward infrastructural
investment. In certain more precise cases, that would also happen
through a return to a subsistence agricultural economy and a partial and
well regulated abandonment of monoculture which doesn’t properly
nourish populations, especially those that have opted for rural exodus
towards the cities and sprawling slums, like Nigeria for example.

For Syria, we should have established a filter to sort refugees but
that would have, ipso facto, privileged Muslim or Christian communities
allied to the regime, to the detriment of the hostile social classes,
who are totally un-integrable into our European societies, because the
Salafism that animates them is viscerally hostile to all forms of
syncretism and all cultures that do not correspond to it 100%. Moreover,
as a general rule, the reception of migratory flows coming from
countries where there are dangerous mafias is not recommended even if
these countries are European like Sicily, Kosovo, Albania, or certain
Caucasian countries. All immigration should pass through a well
established anthropological screening process and not be left to chance,
at the mercy of the “invisible hand” like the one that all the liberals
expect the world to be perfected by. Non-discernment in the face of
migratory flows has transformed this constant of human history into a
catastrophe with unpredictable repercussions in its current
manifestations, as evidently these flows do not bring us a better
society but create a deleterious climate of inter-ethnic conflict,
unbridled criminality, and latent civil war.

Reversing the tendency of migratory flows will happen when we finally
implement a program of triage for migrations, aiming for the return of
criminals and mafiosos, the psychologically unbalanced (that they
deliberately send here, the infrastructure capable of accommodating them
being non-existent in their countries of origin), politicized elements
that seek to import political conflicts foreign to us. Such a policy
will be all the more difficult to translate into daily reality where the
imported mass of migrants is too large. Then we cannot manage it in
proper conditions.

You knew Jean Thiriart. Does his political vision of a “Great Europe” still seem relevant?

Jean Thiriart was firstly a neighbor for me, a man who lived in my
neighborhood. I can note that behind the sturdy and gruff sexagenarian
hid a tender heart but bruised to see humanity fall into ridicule,
triviality, and cowardice. I didn’t know the activist Thiriart because I
was only twelve when he abandoned his political combat at the end of
the 1960s. This combat, which extended over a short decade starting from
Belgium’s abandonment of the Congo and the tragic epilogue of the war
in Algeria for the French, two years later. Thiriart was motivated by a
well developed general idea: abolish the Yalta duopoly, which made
Europe hemiplegic and powerless, and send back the Americans and Soviets
in succession in order to allow the Europeans to develop independently.
He belonged to a generation that had entered politics, very young, at
the end of the 1930s (the emergence of Rexism, the Popular Front, the
war in Spain, the Stalinist purges, Anschluss, the end of the
Czechoslovakia born at Versailles), experienced the Second World War,
the defeat of the Axis, the birth of the state of Israel, the coup in
Prague, and the blockade in Berlin in 1948, the Korean War, and the end
of Stalinism.

Two events certainly contributed to steer them towards an
independentist European nationalism, different in sentiment from the
European nationalism professed by the ideologues of the Axis: the
Hungarian Revolt of 1956 and the Suez campaign, the same year, the year
of my birth in January. The West, subjugated by Washington, did nothing
to aid the unfortunate Hungarians. Worse, during the Suez affair, the
Americans and the Soviets forced the French and British to
unconditionally withdraw from the Egyptian theater of operations.
Thiriart, and a good number of his companions, temporary or not,
observed that the duopoly had no desire to dissolve itself or even to
fight each other, to modify one way or the other the line of the Iron
Curtain that cut Europe across its center, to tolerate any geopolitical
affirmation on the part of European powers (even if they were members of
the UN Security Council like France and the United Kingdom). The
decolonization of the Congo also demonstrated that the United States was
unwilling to support the Belgian presence in central Africa, despite
the fact that Congolese uranium underpinned the nuclear supremacy of
Washington since the atom bombs fabricated in order to bring Japan to
its knees in 1945. A little history, Hergé’s brother was the only
Belgian military officer not to chicken out and he showed an arrogant
hostility to the NATO troops who came to take control of his Congolese
base.

One thing leading to another, Thiriart would create the famous
movement “Jeune Europe” that would inject many innovations into the
discourse of the activist milieu and contest the established order of
what one could classify as the extreme-right in its conventional forms,
petty nationalists or Poujadists. The “habitus” of the extreme-right did
not please Thiriart at all, who judged them unproductive and
pathological. A reader of the great classics of the realist politics,
especially Machiavelli and Pareto, he wanted to create a small
hyper-politicized phalanx, rationally proceeding from truly political
criteria and not thin emotions, creating only behavioral indiscipline.
This political hyper-realism implied thinking in terms of geopolitics,
having a knowledge of the general geography of the planet. This wish was
realized in Italy alone, where the magazine Eurasia of his disciple and
admirer Claudio Mutti has done remarkably well and has attained a very
elevated degree of scientific precision.

To bypass the impediment of Yalta, Thiriart believed that we needed
seek allies across the Mediterranean and in the East of the vast Soviet
territorial mass: thus the attempt to dialogue with the Nasserist Arab
nationalists and the Chinese of Chou Enlai. The Arab attempt rested on a
precise Mediterranean vision, not understood by the Belgian militants
and very well comprehended, on the contrary, by his Italian disciples:
according to Thiriart this internal sea must be freed from all foreign
tutelage. He reproached the various forms of nationalism in Belgium for
not understanding the Mediterranean stakes, these forms turned more
towards Germany or the Netherlands, England or the Scandinavian
countries, an obligatory “Nordic” tropism. His reasoning about the
Mediterranean resembled that of Victor Barthélémy, an adviser of Doriot
and also a former communist, a reasoning shared by Mussolini as
mentioned in his memoirs. Thiriart very probably derived his vision of
Mediterranean geopolitics from a feeling of bitterness following the
eviction of England and France from the Mediterranean space after the
Suez affair in 1956 and the war in Algeria.

According to Thiriart, the Europeans
shared a common Mediterranean destiny with the Arabs that could not be
obliterated by the Americans and their Zionist pawns. Even if the
French, the English, and the Italians had been chased from the
Arabophone North African shore, the new independent Arab states could
not renounce this Mediterranean destiny they shared with non-Muslim
Europeans, massed on the Northern shore. For Thiriart, the waters of the
Great Blue sea unite, not separate. From this fact, we must favor a
policy of convergence between the two civilizational spaces, for the
defense of the Mediterranean against the element foreign to this space,
interfering there, constituted by the American fleet commanded from
Naples.

The idea of allying with the Chinese against the Soviet Union aimed
to force the Soviet Union to let go of its ballast in Europe in order to
confront the Chinese masses on the Amur River front. The dual project
of wagering on the Nasserist Arabs and the Chinese marked the last years
of Thiriart’s political activity. The 1970s were, for him, years of
silence or rather years where he immersed himself in the defense of his
professional niche, namely optometry. When he returned to the fight at
the start of the 1980s, he was nearly forgotten by the youngest and
eclipsed by other political and metapolitical lines of thought; moreover
the given facts had considerably changed: the Americans had allied with
the Chinese in 1972 and, since then, the latter no longer constituted
an ally. Like others, in their own corners and independently of each
other, such as Guido Giannettini and Jean Parvulesco, he elaborated a
Euro-Soviet or Euro-Russian project that the Yeltsin regime didn’t allow
to come to fruition. In 1992 he visited Moscow, met Alexander Dugin and
the “red-browns,” but unexpectedly died in November of the same year.

What we must retain from Thiriart is the idea of a cadre school
formed on principles derived from pure political philosophy and
geopolitics. We must also retain the idea of Europe as a singular
geostrategic and military space. It’s the lesson of the Second World
War: Westphalia defended itself on the beaches of Normandy, Bavaria on
the Côte d’Azur and along the Rhône,
Berlin at Kursk. Engines allowed for the considerable narrowing of the
strategic space just as they allowed for the Blitzkrieg of 1940: with
horse-drawn carts, no army could take Paris from Lorraine or Brabant.
The failures of Philip II after the battle of Saint-Quentin prove it,
Götz von Berlichingen never went past Saint-Dizier, the Prussians and
Austrians never went past Valmy, and the armies of the Kaiser were
stopped on the Marne. One exception: the entrance of the allies into
Paris after the defeat of Napoleon at Leipzig. The United States is
henceforth the sole superpower, even if the development of new arms and
imperial hypertrophy, that it imposed on itself through unthinking
immoderation, slowly break down this colossal military power, recently
defied by the new capabilities of Russian or perhaps Chinese missiles.
European independence happens through a sort of vast front of refusal,
through the participation of synergies outside of what Washington
desires, as Armin Mohler also wanted. This refusal will slowly but
surely erode the supremacist policy of the Americans and finally make
the world “multipolar.” As Thiriart, but also Armin Mohler, doubtlessly
wanted, and, following them, Alexander Dugin, Leonid Savin, and yours
truly want, multipolarity is the objective to aim for.

Three German author seem to have left their mark on you
particularly: Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt and Günter Maschke. What do you
retain from their thought?

Actually, you ask me to write a book… I admire the political writings
of the young Jünger, composed in the middle of the turmoil of the 1920s
just as I also admire his travel narratives, his seemingly banal
observations which have made some Jüngerians, exegetes of his work, say
that he was an “Augenmensch,” literally a “man of the eyes,” a man who
surveys the world of nature and forms (cultural, architectural) through
his gaze, through a penetrating gaze that reaches far beyond the surface
of apparent things and perceives the rules and the rhythms of their
internal nature.

Very soon I will release a voluminous but certainly not exhaustive
work on Carl Schmitt. Here I want to remind people that Carl Schmitt
wrote his first relevant texts at the age of sixteen and laid down his
last fundamental text onto paper at 91. So we have a massive body of
work that extends over three quarters of a century. Carl Schmitt is the
theorist of many things but we essentially retain from him the idea of
decision and the idea of the “great space.” My work, published by
éditions du Lore, will show the Schmitt’s relation to Spain, the very
particular nature of his Roman Catholicism in the context of debates
that animated German Catholicism, his stance in favor of Land against
Sea, etc.

Speaking about Günter Maschke interests me more in the framework of
the present interview. I met Günter Maschke at the Frankfurt Book Fair
in 1984, then during a small colloquium organized in Cologne by high
schoolers and students under the banner of the Gesamtdeutscher
Studentenverband, an association that intended to oversee the student
organizations which, at the time, were working towards the reunification
of the country. Maschke was a thundering and petulant former leader of
the activist years of 1967 and 1968 in Vienna, from which he would be
expelled for street violence. In order to escape prison in West Germany,
because he was a deserter, he successfully defected, via the French
collective, “Socialisme ou Barbarie,” first to Paris, then Cuba. He then
settled in the insular Castroist Carribean republic and met Castro
there, who gave him a tour of the island in order to show him “his”
sugar cane fields and all “his” agricultural property. Maschke, who
can’t hold his tongue, retorted to him, “But you are the greatest
latifundist in Latin America!” Vexed, the supreme leader didn’t renew
his right of asylum and Maschke found himself back at the beginning,
that is to say in a West German prison for thirteen months, the span of
the military service he refused, as demanded by the law. In prison, he
discovered Carl Schmitt and his Spanish disciple Donoso Cortès, and in
the cramped space of his cell, he found his road to Damascus.

Many activists from 67-68 in Germany henceforth turned their backs on
the ideologies they professed or utilized (without really believing in
them too much) in their youth years: Rudi Dutschke was basically a
anti-American Lutheran nationalist; his brothers gave interviews to the
Berlin new conservative magazine Junge Freiheit and not usual leftist
press, which repeats the slogans of yesterday without realizing that it
has fallen into anachronism and ridicule; Frank Böckelmann, who was
presented to me by Maschke during a Book Fair, came from German
Situationism and never hesitated to castigate his former comrades whose
anti-patriotism, he said, was the mark of a “craving for limits,” of a
will to limit themselves and mutilate themselves politically, to
practice ethno-masochism. Klaus Rainer Röhl, a nonagenarian today, was
the spouse of Ulrike Meinhof, who sunk into terrorism with Baader. Röhl
too became closer to the nationalists while the articles of Ulrike
Meinhof in her magazine konkret would trigger the first fights in
Berline during the arrival of the Shah of Iran.

Uli Edel’s film devoted to the “Baader Meinhof Gang” (2008) also
shows the gradual slide of the terrorist “complex” in West Germany,
which arose from an idealistic and unreasoning, uninhibited, and
hysteric anti-imperialism, but often correct in some of its analyses, to
pass into an even more radical terrorism but ultimately in the service
of American imperialism: in his film, Edel shows the stakes very
clearly, notably when Baader, already arrested and sentenced, speaks
with the chief of police services and explains to him that the second
generation of terrorists no longer obeys the same guidelines, especially
not his. The second generation of terrorists, while Meinhof, Baader and
Ensslin (Maschke’s sister in law!) were imprisoned and had not yet
committed suicide, assassinated statesmen or economic decision makers
who correctly wanted to pursue policies in contradiction with the
desires of the United States and free West Germany from the cumbersome
tutelage that Washington imposed on it. This shift also explains the
attitude taken by Horst Mahler, Baader’s lawyer and partisan in armed
struggle in his time. He would also pass to nationalism when he was
released from prison, a nationalism strongly tinted with Lutheranism,
and he would return to prison for “revisionism.” The last I heard, he
was still languishing there.

At the start of the 1980s, Maschke was an editor in Cologne and
notably published the works of Carl Schmitt (Land and Sea), Mircea
Eliade, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Agnès Heller, and Régis Debray. Every
year, in October when the famous Frankfurt Book Fair took place,
Maschke, who thought I had the countenance of an imperturbable young
reactionary, had Sigi, his unforgettable spouse who left us much too
soon, set up a cot in the middle of his prestigious office, where the
most beautiful flowers of his library were found. So every year, from
1985 to 2003, I frequented the “Maschke Salon,” where personalities as
prestigious as the Catholic and conservative writer Martin Mosebach or
the Greek political philosopher Panajotis Kondylis, the ex-Situationist
Franck Böckelmann,or the Swiss polemicist Jean-Jacques Langendorf
dropped by. These soirees were, I must admit, pretty boozy; we sang and
performed poems (Maschke likes those by Gottfried Benn), the fun was de
rigeur and the ears of a good number of fools and pretentious people
must have rung as they were lampooned. I inherited a frank manner of
talking from Maschke, who often reproached me, and he helped consolidate
my mocking Bruxellois verve, which I owe to my uncle Joseph, my
mother’s very sarcastic brother.

I can’t finish this segment without
recalling the fortuitous meeting between Maschke and Joschka Fischer,
the year where the latter had become a minister in the Land of Hesse,
the first step that would lead him to become the German minister of
foreign affairs who made his country participate in the war against
Serbia. Fischer strolled down the long hallways of the Book Fair.
Maschke came up to him and patted his stomach, very plump, saying to
everyone: “Well, comrade Fischer, fattening up to become minister.” Next
followed a torrent of acerbic words poured out on the little Fischer
who looked at his sneakers (his trademark at the time, in order to look
“cool”) and stammered apologies that he wasn’t. Scolding him as if he
was only a dirty brat, Maschke proved to him that his Schmittian
neo-nationalism was in accord with the anti-imperialist tendencies of
the 1967-68 years, while Fischer’s alignment was a shameful treason. The
future would give him ample justification: Fischer, former violent
Krawallo (hooligan) of Hessian leftism, became a vile servant of
capitalist and American imperialism: the dithyrambic phrases that he
pronounced these last weeks praising Chancellor Merkel only accentuate
this bitter feeling of betrayal. These remarks are evidently valid for
Daniel Cohn-Bendit, today a war monger on sale to Washington.
Jean-François Kahn, in an interview very recently accorded to Revue des
deux mondes, spoke of him as a former sixty-eighter turned neocon in the
style of the East Side Trotskyites.

In his quest after his return from Cuba and his stay in a dreary
Bavarian prison, Maschke, unlike Mahler or Dutschke’s family for
example, evolved, with Schmitt and Donoso, towards a Baroque and joyous
Catholicism, strongly tinted with Hispanicism and rejected the uptight,
Protestant, and neo-Anabaptist violence that so clearly marked the
German extra-parliamentary revolutionaries of the sixties. For him as
for the director Edel, the Ensslin sisters, for example, were
excessively marked by the rigorous and hyper-moralist education inherent
to their Protestant familial milieu, which seemed insupportable after
his stay in Cuba and his journeys to Spain. Also because Gudrun Ensslin
fell into a morbid taste for an unbridled and promiscuous sexuality,
resulting from a rejection of Protestant Puritanism as Edel’s film
highlights. The Maschkian critique of the anti-Christianity of the
(French) New Right is summarized by a few choice words, as is his habit:
thus he repeats, “they are guys who read Nietzsche and Asterix
simultaneously and then fabricated a system from this mixture.” For him,
the anti-Christianity of Nietzsche was a hostility to the rigors of the
Protestantism of the family of Prussian pastors from which the
philosopher of Sils-Maria came, a mental attitude that is impossible to
transpose in France, whose tradition is Catholic, Maschke doesn’t take
the Jansenist tradition into account. These anecdotes show that any
political attitude must fall back into a kind of Aristotlean realism.

You return to the contribution of the Celtic world to our
continental civilization in your book “Pages celtiques.” What do we
retain from the “Gaulish” in our European identity? You return to the
Irish and the Scottish nationalist movement at length. What lessons
should we draw from their long struggles?

In “Pages celtiques”, I wanted, essentially, to underline three
things: firstly, the disappearance of all Celtic cultural and linguistic
references is the result of the Romanization of the Gauls; this
Romanization was apparently rapid within the elites but slower in the
spheres of popular culture, where they resisted for five or six
centuries. The vernacular culture retained the Celtic language until the
arrival of the Germans, the Franks, who took over from the Romans. We
can affirm that the popular religiosity retained the religiosity of
“eternal peasants” (Mircea Eliade) and it remained more or less the
religion whose rituals were practiced by the Celts. This religiosity of
the soil remained intact under the Christian veneer, only the religion
of the elites from the start. The dei loci, the gods of places, simply
became saints or Madonnas, nestled in the trunks of oaks or placed at
crossroads or near springs. The “de-Celticization,” the eradication of
the religion of “eternal peasants,” occurred under the blows of
modernity, with the generalization of television and … with Vatican II.
What the French still have from the “Gaulish”, was put to sleep: it’s a
fallow field awaiting a reawakening. Our essence, in Belgium, was deeply
Germanized and Romanized, in the sense where the Eburons, the
Aduatuques, and the Treviri were already partially Germanized in the
time of Caesar or later when the Ingvaeonic Germanic tribes settled in
the valley of the Meuse served Rome and rapidly Latinized.Secondly the Celtic contribution is equally Christian in the sense
where, at the end of the Merovingian era and at the start of the
Pippinic / Carolingian era, Christian missions were not only guided by
Rome, they were also Irish – Scottish with Saint Columban, who settled
in Luxeuil-les-Bains, the formerly Gaulish, then Roman, thermal baths
site. Lorraine, Alsace, Franche-Comté, Switzerland, Wurtemberg, Bavaria,
Tyrol, and a part of Northern Italy received the Christian message not
from the apostles who came from the Levant or missionaries mandated by
Rome but from Irish – Scottish monks and ascetics who proclaimed a
Christianity closer to the natural religiosity of the indigenous
peoples, with some pantheist dimensions, while advocating the large
scale copying of ancient, Greek and Latin manuscripts. The Christian,
Celtic, and Greco-Latin syncretism that they offered us remains the
foundation of our European culture and any attempt to remove or
eradicate one of these elements would be a useless, even perverse,
mutilation, that would deeply unbalance the foundations of our
societies. The smug and foolish moralism, proper to the recent history
of the Church and its desire to “third worldize,” also ruined all the
seduction that the religion could exercise on the popular masses.
Failing to take the vernacular (Celtic or otherwise) into account and
ceasing to defend the heritage of the classical humanities (with the
political philosophy of Aristotle) at any price has separated the masses
from the intellectual and political elites of the Church. The parishes
have lost their flocks: actually, what did they have to gain from
hearing the moralizing sermons without depth repeated ad nauseum that
the Church henceforth offers to them.

Thirdly, in the 18th century, the Irish, Scottish, and
Welsh Enlightenment philosophers were certainly hostile to absolutism,
calling for new forms of democracy, demanding popular participation in
public affairs and calling for a respect of vernacular cultures by the
elite. The enlightenment republicanism of the Irish, Scottish, and Welsh
hostile to the English monarchy which subjected the Celtic peoples and
Scottish people (a mixture of Celts, Norwegians, and free Anglo Saxons)
to a veritable process of colonization, particularly cruel, but this
hostility was accompanied by a very pious devotion to the cultural
productions of the common people. In Ireland, this republicanism was not
hostile to the homegrown and anti-establishment Catholicism of the
Irish nor to the multiple remnants of pantheist paganism that was
naturally and syncretically harbored in this Irish Catholicism. The
representatives of this religiosity were not treated as “fanatics,”
“superstitious,” or “brigands” by the Republican elites. They would not
be vilified nor dragged to the guillotine or gallows.

The Celtic Enlightenment philosophers of the British Isles did not
deny rootedness. On the contrary, they exalted it. Brittany,
non-republican, was the victim, like the entire West, of a ferocious
repression by the “infernal columns.” It largely adhered to the ancien
régime, cultivating nostalgia, also because it had, in the era of the
ancien régime, a “Parliament of Brittany,” that functioned in an optimal
manner. The uncle of Charles De Gaulle, “Charles De Gaulle No. 1”,
would be the head of a Celtic renaissance in Brittany in the 19th
century, in the framework of a monarchist ideology. In the same era,
the Irish independence activists struggled to obtain “Home Rule”
(administrative autonomy). Among them, at the end of the 19th
century, was Padraig Pearse, who created a mystic nationalism,
combining anti-English Catholicism and Celtic mythology. He would pay
for his unwavering commitment with his life: he would be shot following
the Easter Rising of 1916. Likewise, the union leader James Connolly
mixed syndicalist Marxism and the liberatory elements of Irish
mythology. He would share the tragic fate of Pearse.

The leaders of the Irish independence movement offer to political
observers of all stripes an original cocktail of nationalist labor
unionism, mystic Celticism, and social Catholicism, where the ideology
of human rights would be mobilized against the British not in an
individualist sense, featuring, for reference, a man detached from any
social bond with the past, thus a man who is modeled as a “nameless
apostasy from reality.” On the contrary, from the start Irish Republican
ideology reasons according a vision of man that fits into into a
cultural, social, and bio-ethnic whole. All that must also be the object
of legal protection with a corollary that any attack, anywhere in the
world, on one of these ethnic-social-cultural ensembles is an attack on a
fundamental human right, the right to belong to a culture. So the
rights of man, for the Irish, are inseparable from the cultures that
animate and feed human societies.

After the Second World War, the Welsh would take up the cause of the
Bretons pursued by the Republic, which would be condemned by the
International Court of Human Rights for crimes against Breton culture:
this fact is quite evidently forgotten, because it was knowingly hidden.
Today, notably following the peremptory tirades of the “nouveaux
philosophes,” whose path begins around 1978 and continues today, forty
years later (!), with the hysterical fulminations of Bernard-Henri Lévy,
the Republic sees itself as the defender par excellence of human
rights: it is henceforth piquant and amusing to recall that it was
condemned on a charge brought by the Welsh and Irish for crimes against a
vernacular culture of the Hexagon, and consequently any politically act
that ultimately infringes the rights of a people’s culture, or denies
it the mere right to exist and propagate, is equally a crime liable for
an equivalent sentence. So there exist other possible interpretations
and applications of human rights than those that automatically treat
anyone who claims an identity rooted in physical belonging as backwards
or potentially fascist. Thus human rights are perfectly compatible with
the right to live in a rooted, specific, and inalienable culture that
ultimately has a sacred value, on soil it has literally turned for
centuries. Hervé Juvin, through an original and politically relevant
interpretation of the ethnological and anthropological works of Claude
Lévi-Strauss and Robert Jaulin, is the one who has shown us the way to
follow today in order to leave behind this deleterious atmosphere, where
we are called to swear an inextinguishable hatred towards what we are
deep within ourselves, to rob ourselves of what’s deep in our hearts in
order to wallow in the nihilism of consumerism and political
correctness.

I partially owe this Celticism,both revolutionary and identitarian,
to the German activist, sociologist, and ethnologist Henning Eichberg,
theorist and defender of identities everyone in the world, who expressed
an analogous Celticism in a militant and programmatic work, published
at the start of the 1980s, at the same time Olier Mordrel published his
“Mythe de l’Hexagone.” Elsewhere, my friend Siegfried Bublies would give
the title Wir Selbst to his non-conformist, national-revolutionary
magazine, the German translation of the Gaelic Sinn Fein (“We
Ourselves”). Bublies was the editor of Eichberg’s polemical and
political texts, who passed away, alas too soon, in April 2017.

In “Pages celtiques”, I also pay homage to Olier Mordrel, the Breton
combatant, and define the notion of carnal fatherland, while castigating
the ideologies that want to eradicate or criminalize it.

You’ve restarted Trans-European activities. How do you the judge the evolution of “identitarian”forces in Europe?

No, I’ve restarted nothing at all. I’m too old. We must leave it to
the youth, who are doing very well according to the criteria and divides
inherent to their generation, according to modes of communication that I
haven’t mastered as well as they have, such as social networks, videos
on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, or others. The institutions challenging
the ambient mismanagement are multiplying at a good pace because we are
experiencing a consolidated conservative revolution in relation to what
it was, lying fallow, twenty or thirty years ago. It’s true that the
dominant powers have not kept their promises: from the Thirty Glorious
Years, we’ve passed to the Thirty Piteous Year, according to the Swiss
writer Alexandre Junod, who I knew as a child and has grown up so much …
And he is still optimistic, this boy: if he wrote a book, he would have
to mention the “Thirty Shitty Years.” As we’ve fallen very very low.
It’s really the Kali Yuga, as the traditionalists who like to mediate on
Hindu or Vedic texts say. I modestly put myself in the service of new
initiatives. The identitarian forces today are diverse but the common
denominators between these initiatives are multiplying, quite happily.
We must work for convergences and synergies (as I’ve always said…). My
editor Laurent Hocq has limited himself to announcing three
international colloquiums in order to promote our books in Lille, Paris,
and Rome. That’s all. For my part, I will limit myself to advise
initiatives like the “Synergies européennes” summer universities, even
if they are very theoretical, as they allow me to encounter and adapt
fruitful strategies for the years to come.